


Brain Damage

by dollarformyname



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 21:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1361746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarformyname/pseuds/dollarformyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There's someone in my head but it's not me</i>, Alec thinks, and then shakes himself before the rest of the song gets trapped in there. He knows it's a song but it's not a song he knows, and somehow that's too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brain Damage

**Author's Note:**

> While working on finishing things I left hanging amidst all the RL unpleasantness of last year, I found a bunch of things sitting on my harddrive that I'd forgotten about. This is one of them. 
> 
> Written for [this prompt](http://jam-pony-fic.livejournal.com/297963.html?thread=558827#t558827) at jam_pony_fic's [Halloween comment meme](http://jam-pony-fic.livejournal.com/297963.html): _Ben's Ghost returns and he's decided to live through Alec once he realizes he can possess him for short amounts of time. It entertains him to do things Alec would never do and is really embarrassed by (singing Karoke or proudly wearing old TeamEdward tee-shirts). Would love an awkward Logan/BenAlec kiss thrown in here. Whether that goes anywhere or not is up to author.._
> 
> It's waaay late and out of season, obviously, and I went for a darker take, but I hope the prompter likes it. I'm labeling it gen, because nothing sexy or romantic really happens, but I guess it might have Alec/Max, Alec/Logan, and possibly some twisted Ben/Logan type vibes? Depending on what shipper goggles you've got on. Also, I'm not too sure about this thing, but it seems like it just wants to be what it is. I feel like I should warn for ambiguity and abruptness, just in case.

`Something slipped. Something`

Alec blinks. 

`slipped`

Water snakes down his bare back and muck squishes between his toes. 

`out.`

He's out of breath and cold, pants soaked through and his fingertips white against the bark, clutching so hard they've gone numb.

Clutching a tree. In the woods. 

"What the—" he tries, but it comes out raspy, makes his throat itch and seize up. He coughs, and the fact that he's cold hits him again. 

He's _really_ cold, muscles aching deep down like he's been violently shivering for a while now. Rain drips into his eyes, and everything around him runs together, mushy and indistinct, as if he got out of bed intending to take a piss and sleep-stumbled into one of those smeared messes Joshua calls paintings instead. Last he recalls, he _was_ in bed. And now he very clearly isn't.

Alec swallows the lump back from his throat. Blackouts and chunks of lost time aren't new to him, but he hasn't experienced any of that since Manticore was swept up and away in huge, foul clouds of black smoke. If anything, he's suffered the opposite: patchwork coming undone and his ugly, disjointed nightmares fleshed out with uglier truths. This is backwards, and he doesn't like it. 

He doesn't like it but he knows how to deal with it. He's got enough hard-won sense to know when a situation has the potential to be terribly delicate, so he very deliberately doesn't think about it. 

He lets go of the tree, wobbles and has to grab at it again to stay upright, breaths coming out faster and his chest gurgling. Feels like his lungs are packed with wet cotton, but that's. That can't be right.

Blinking some more, he realizes he's pretty deep into the woods, where it'd be dark even at high noon on a clear day. He knows it's not noon, though. It feels like nighttime. Smells like damp earth and sounds like...

Like rain. Like the steady patter of water on a floor of dead leaves, and nothing else. 

Alec licks his lips and tries letting go of the tree again. When he doesn't fall flat on his face, he pushes his luck and takes a step. Somewhere beyond the rush of blood in his ears, he can hear the city—far, far away but _there_ —the muted hum of cluttered life and a vague promise of returning sanity. That's the way to go, so he does. 

-:-

The woods don't thin out. They're dense and suffocating, shadows a constant threat that chase and swallow him up at the same time, this forever-lost blindness that is here, there, everywhere until it's (`burning too bright can't see can't`) _not_ , and Alec finds himself tripping over a road. 

The open air and moonlight wash over him so abruptly it leaves him slightly dazed, pavement icy and slick under his feet. He's panting, heart racing like he ran the whole way at top-speed instead of bumbling around all clumsy and fuzzy-headed. He swipes at the water on his face again, and that's when he sees it. 

His hands are mostly washed clean from the rain, but the dark gunk under his fingernails is unmistakable. It hits him, belatedly, that he smelled it long before this and hadn't spared it a second thought. That it hadn't registered as something out of place. 

He checks himself over but there's nothing. He's not injured. 

It's not his blood. 

-:-

Joshua's not home when Alec stumbles in. Most transgenics are prone to insomnia, so that's not surprising; Josh probably woke up and wandered up to his little roof shelter to paint faces on rocks (or whatever the latest variation on his favorite hobby is), and Alec lets out a rattling sigh, relieved. The places on him that haven't gone numb feel frozen solid, joints creaking when he moves, and he kind of doubts his stealth abilities right now. 

He heads straight for the bathroom, doesn't hesitate to turn the water on as hot as he can get it before dumping himself into the tub, pants and all. He's never been more thankful for the few water heaters they managed to scrounge up for Terminal City, even if Max will be pissed at him for throwing off the ration schedule. He's sure no one has ever felt as cold as he does right now, though; he needs to thaw more than anyone else needs a comfortable morning shower.

He tells himself he'll go back when the sun's up. He'll go back and he'll find the carcass of the wild animal that attacked him. Or something. Something logical. Hangs onto that flimsy comfort and lays there for a while, inhaling steam and soaking up every last ounce of heat, sensation tingling its way back into all his numb parts. Breathing gets a little easier, awareness slipping in and out comfortably, until he comes awake underwater and splutters back to the surface, emptying half the bath onto the floor in the process. 

A near-drowning is probably his cue to get out. 

Stripping off what's left of his pants, he kicks them into a corner and wipes a clear streak through the fog on the mirror. 

He doesn't know what he expects to see. Loose wires or a visibly shorting circuit, maybe. A **Psy-Ops Division** stamp on some messily exposed part of his sanity. His face is flushed from the bath, eyes a little glassier than he thinks they should be, but there's nothing noticeably different or out of place. It's the same Alec that looked out at him yesterday. He stares anyway, hardly blinking and waiting for some illusion to break, but his reflection doesn't change. All he accomplishes is making himself go cross-eyed and a little dizzy. 

_I got out,_ he thinks, randomly. `_Everything_ got out.`

For a long while, that's the last thing he remembers clearly. 

-:-

Alec blinks, and he's hugging the toilet and watching last night's macaroni dinner float around in the bowl, guts all in a twisted knot and his throat burned raw. 

-:-

Alec blinks. He's being held captive by a tangle of sheets. The sun is high, glaring down on him through the windows. He's slippery with sweat, can hardly catch his breath between the coughs racking him but he can't let that matter because it's not happening, it doesn't happen to him and there are other things. Important things like. Like. 

`Get up, go, be somewhere else.`

He's been here too long.

-:-

Alec blinks, and he's outside. Decayed rooftops are washed sunset-red, trash sloshing around the gutters from the recent rain. Little monsters are flooding the sidewalks and crawling over broken cars and generally running rampant in public like no one's going to be opening fire on them anytime soon, brightly colored buckets and bags clutched in their little fists. 

_Post-apocalyptic suburbia,_ Alec thinks, as a group of them run (`away from the soldiers` ) by him, shrieking. 

-:-

Alec blinks. He isn't cold anymore. He's burning up. There was a fire, and they got out, and now they're fucking everywhere. 

-:-

Alec blinks, and he's standing in the middle of a back road out of Seattle, looking down at the wreckage of Max's bike. He has a gun in his hand, warm to the touch and empty of bullets. There are thirty-eight voice mails and seventy-two missed calls on his phone, buttons smeared red by the time he puts it back into his pocket. The manic beat of his pulse deafens him to all other sound. 

Alec blinks.

Blinks. 

He blinks. 

-:-

He wakes up in a dumpster. 

His gun is gone but he's still got his phone, a little glowing blue window in his hand attempting to communicate with him in some faraway tin-robot voice. He's not surprised to get a lungful of rotten air, buried in garbage the way he is, and the fact that the front of his shirt is soaked in blood is also not surprising at the same time that it kind of is. He doesn't know where his jacket went.

_Max is gonna be pissed_ , he thinks, though he can't remember why. There's just this vague feeling of an impending ass-kicking and the sense that he probably deserves it. 

"Hello?" Alec says, because at some point he brought the phone up to his ear and the voice is less made of tin and more made of Cindy. He still can't understand what she's shouting about. 

"Goddammit, boy, you gotta quit doin' that to me," is the first sentence that comes across clearly. 

_What'd I do?_ he starts to say, but decides against it. There's that constant buzz of `something` behind his headache and a twist of dread in his gut that warns him he might want to wallow in ignorance a little while longer. "I don't know—"

_—where I am._

_—why I'm talking to you._

_—what the fuck is going on._

"I don't remember," is what he settles on, a tremble in his voice that he both hates and is grateful for because it seems to get the message across: _Tell me, but don't tell me._

Cindy mutters something that sounds a little wet and a lot angry, and then, "You were going to Logan's. You said it was close before you—" She pauses, blowing a couple of shaky breaths into the phone. "Before you forgot. Are you—is it still close?"

"I, uh." He pushes himself up, fingers slipping in some anonymous squishy grit and a crumpled soda can stabbing into the back of his calf before he manages to look over the side. He's in an alley, which seems like it should've been obvious, and it's dark. Quiet. The streetlight at the mouth of the alley flickers on and off erratically, and his eyes burn. "I'm not sure."

"Then _get_ sure, fool," Cindy snaps, and the tone of her voice tells him maybe she's been at this a while, this talking sense into someone who can't hold onto it to save his own life. 

"Okay," is all Alec says, and tries to make it comforting. He knows it isn't. 

"Max and Josh and just about everyone you ever met are out looking," she tells him while he's crawling out of the dumpster. "Hurry up and find me a street sign before you flake out again."

She goes on, alternating between firm directives and insults and talking just to give him something to listen to, and Alec marvels at how well she knows him. It still catches him off guard, sometimes, that people can do that. He thinks it can't be an easy thing. 

Getting up and moving has the unfortunate side effect of pushing the fog back and making Alec more aware of himself, and he gets distracted—the stinging cuts and gashes across his face, his arms, the ache in his ribs. 

_Defense wounds._

The sour roll of panic up the back of his throat is less and less willing to be ignored. His hands shake and when his feet touch pavement he realizes something's wrong with his knee, swollen fat and taking up twice the space it should in the leg of his jeans.

" _Hey,_ " Cindy says. "You better not be wandering off in that busted head of yours right now or I swear to god."

"Wasn't," Alec mumbles, and it's mostly true. He manages to limp over to a wall and let it hold him up for a few seconds before venturing further. "I'm fine."

"About as fine as a bag of kittens in a river. You see anything yet?" 

He's on the street now, flickering yellow light directly overhead, and it's deserted. The stores are shut up safely for the night, windows darkened and the curbs dotted with a random car here and there, still and waiting. The moonlight paints the shadows deep blue. 

"I know where this is," Alec says. "There's no one here."

"Tell me."

Alec tells her, and says again, "There's no one here," because that's important, somehow. 

"It's only two blocks," Cindy says carefully. "Joshua's old house. You remember how to get there, right?"

Alec grits his teeth. "Just because I'm losing my mind doesn't mean I'm fucking stupid. I know, I just." His eyes have started watering, steady burn turned to needle pricks. He takes a deep breath. "I think I should stay."

"Alec—"

"No, Cindy, listen to me, okay? It's... it's safer if I stay put. Tell them to come. Whoever, I don't care," he insists, this dawning and irrefutable certainty that if he goes wandering, he'll go `wandering`. And maybe sitting tight won't prevent that, but there's a kind of security in knowing he'll have to make that bit of extra effort to find trouble. "I'm gonna wait right here."

There's a long, long pause, and then Cindy says, "If you're gonna stay put then sit your ass down," her breath coming in unsteady bursts now, like she's on the move. "Tie yourself to something if you gotta. And don't you dare hang up this phone."

Alec nods and does just that, but when his ass hits the sidewalk and his back settles against the cold brick of a hardware store, a new kind of panic sets in. He feels vulnerable, suddenly, out here in the open with the knowledge that someone is coming for him.

_Get up, go..._

It hits him like a fact of life or proven science that he'd temporarily forgotten—he needs to run. More fiercely than he's ever needed to do anything in his life, he needs to run and keep running and never stop.

`Escape and evade.`

"No," he says aloud without meaning to, doing his damnedest to dig his fingertips into the cement around him. 

Cindy doesn't get a chance to respond. She's dialed someone on three-way, working her own little dispatch and, just as Alec starts arguing with his own mind, the someone on the other end picks up. 

Alec tries to listen to the details, but ultimately decides all his concentration is better used keeping his eyes open and not getting back up. 

He'll wait right here, and he won't blink. 

-:-

Max gets there first. 

He picks up the sound of his own motorcycle engine long before he sees her. Slicing a path down the abandoned street on his Duke, trash and dead leaves swirl in her wake as if she's dragged the wind along behind her, kicking and screaming, for this very purpose. It makes him think of hurricanes in bottles, great whites in butterfly nets, a hundred wild beasts crammed into a cage of bone and girl-skin.

"Never gonna work," he mutters to no one. His eyes ache something fierce and time seems to have stuttered again but he thinks he's been here the whole time, here and himself, but maybe not. Maybe, maybe, but it's not like that matters. He's here now. 

Max spots him pretty quickly and nearly dumps the bike without braking in her haste to get to him. She doesn't look pissed. 

Alec is one part relieved, one part disgusted, and two parts terrified. The terror doesn't belong to him (this desperate, cornered-animal scrabbling at the back of his mind that he works furiously to block out) but the disgusted relief he is all too familiar with. Max has an unpleasant habit of playing the knight to Alec's damsel, which is pretty humiliating, but she's also an unswerving force to be reckoned with. Constant and reassuring.

"You're sick," she determines right away, pressing her palm and then the back of her hand against his forehead again and again, like she thinks his skin is playing tricks on her. "How are you sick?"

He offers his hand in response— _tries_ to offer his hand. It's tethered to the burglar bars of the hardware store's front window with his bloodied shirt, arm bent awkwardly behind and above his head. 

Another nice thing about Max is that, despite her persistent confusion when it comes to Alec's more irksome habits and motivations, there are some things she just _gets_ , no painstakingly drawn maps necessary. 

"Okay," she breathes, even though the restless flick flick flick of her eyes says her attention is better spent on things like the ugly bruising across his midsection or the painful bulge that used to be a knee. She works the sloppy knot of the shirt loose before wrapping it securely around her own wrist. "Okay?"

Alec nods, pushing out a sigh and finally allowing his eyes to fall shut, just for a second. Being tied to Max is a hell of a lot more comforting than being tied to a building. She's sturdy, she can fight back, and she—she 

_makes it better._

`makes it worse.`

The gentle, smooth weight sliding across his eyelid startles him, and he jerks. 

"It's okay." Max doesn't pull her hand away, just lets her thumb slide lower so she's not poking him in the eye. His face is sore and he doesn't remember why. 

He doesn't remember Logan showing up, either, car idling at the curb with the back door wide open and the man himself crouched next to Max, watching Alec warily. Doesn't remember when either of them managed to bundle him up in Logan's overcoat. 

"You fell asleep," Max says before the rush of Alec's pulse can get too rabbit-wild. "It was only a few minutes."

Alec's fingers twitch but he doesn't touch. "Is it—" He pulls in a deep breath. Lets it back out. He's been thinking about this and the not knowing doesn't suit him as much he'd like. "How bad is it?"

Something flashes across her face too quickly to pin down, eyes shuttering. It feels like disapproval, in part, like someone's world ending, maybe his and maybe not, and it also feels like dishonesty. He's being lied to, she's a liar and it splits him right down the middle. He clings to that. He tries really hard to cling to that, but then Logan is moving closer with a first-aid kit to dab at Alec's cheeks with something wet and burning, latex glove-smell in Alec's nose and he won't quite meet Alec's gaze, but that's not as important as this, him, too close. He watches Logan and smells Logan and it's not like Max, the way she scatters his focus, can't get his thoughts together and that's good because his thoughts are unreliable traitorous things, but _Logan_ is a singular train of thought that reunites entities better divided, obsessive, and something in him turns over; stirs. He wants to scramble away but his back is against a wall and never mind that, he doesn't want to, never mind. 

Alec didn't think he could get anymore fucked in the head, but these two, they're managing it. 

Max swipes the pad of her thumb across the underside of his eye again. "What happened to your eyes?"

And that's not an answer, that's not— "What?"

"Did you do this?" she asks, another swipe that makes his face tingle and sting, and then she brings up their bound hands to show him the blood and scraps of skin caught under his own fingernails. 

He shakes his head because he doesn't know and she clearly does and that makes it a stupid question. He doesn't have time for this shit. 

She huffs, a sad little puff of sound. "Can you walk?"

"Yeah," Alec says, then more firmly, " _Yes_ ," when she looks like she's ready to throw him over her shoulder anyway. 

She doesn't carry him but she does insist on helping him up and keeping an arm around his waist as he limps to the car, Logan circling the two of them like an overprotective hawk, round and round he goes, save the world, save everyone, so fucking righteous, clean, soft hands made for fixing but not Alec. Alec can't be fixed. It makes Alec wants to drag him through the mud and mark him up, bring him down to his level for a while and see how he likes it. 

Alec presses closer to Max, a hundred beasts in a cage and she'd let them all out, would tear Alec's own beasts open with her teeth before she'd let him—

A messenger bike comes tearing around the corner, Sketchy pedaling like a madman with Cindy standing on the rear wheel pegs, hands tight on his shoulders and a bulky messenger pack slung across her back, both of them with wildly flying hair and wide-eyed, determined faces. 

_Urgent delivery,_ Alec thinks, somewhat manically. _Daring rescues available 24-7, tips optional, don't forget to sign on the dotted line._

No one else seems to appreciate the humor of the situation. Max's frown is stubborn as she crawls awkwardly into the backseat with him, tethered wrists complicating the process, and Logan just looks relieved. He tosses his keys to Sketchy before the bike's even hit the sidewalk and he and Cindy are springing off the thing in synchronized motion. Logan jerks his head at Cindy, who shoots Alec a look of disgruntled concern before nodding and going to shove the Duke back up onto its wheels and swinging herself up onto it. Sketchy makes himself at home behind the wheel of the SUV while Logan jams the messenger bike through the rear hatch, then hops into the backseat with Alec and Max, and before Alec knows it they're all on the move. 

Alec takes a minute to be impressed with their wordless coordination. Hanging around transgenics too long, he supposes. Or maybe they were always this way; missed opportunities hiding in plain sight, Manticore's loss is his gain. 

Something like that. 

"What do you remember?" Logan asks, resuming his first aid, he and Max crowding Alec from both sides but careful not to touch each other.

Alec just sprawls there, letting them have their way with him. He's too preoccupied with the infection that's caught hold of his mind to assert much independence right now. Invasion might be a better word, though his immune system, kicked into overdrive and trying to burn the madness out, seems to disagree. 

"Avoiding my question with questions," Alec says, annoyed again. "Crazy doesn't equal ignorant. I still know these tricks."

"You're not crazy," Max snaps. She's scrounged an Ace bandage up from somewhere, using her pocketknife to cut open the leg of his pants and get at his knee. Another simple procedure made difficult with one of her hands wrapped up tight with his own, but she makes do. "And the answer to your question is that we don't know. Not all of it. Not yet."

"But some of it," Alec pushes. She scowls, so he grudgingly settles for what he hopes is an easier question: "How long?"

"Nine and a half hours," Logan says, like he's had a stopwatch running this whole time. "Joshua noticed you were gone around one in the morning and went looking, more out of curiosity than concern, really. But when he couldn't find you after a couple hours, he came and got Max. Then Normal said he saw you running down the street like demons were after you earlier this afternoon, not long after trick-or-treating started, and you know how he can be." Logan offers a knowing smirk that Alec chooses to ignore, finishes cleaning up his face and sets to work on his hands. 

"He sounded the red alert," Max picks up. "We asked around, found a couple of people that said they saw you acting like a total spaz, and by then Normal and Joshua had officially organized the search party." 

"No one else had seen or heard from you until Cindy finally got you to pick up the phone," Logan concludes. 

Alec fidgets, hyper-aware of the gaps in their story and wishing he wasn't. He doesn't remember much but there's enough, flashing snapshots of violence that they aren't accounting for, and then there's the physical evidence. The damage he's taken, the blood, Max's missing bike and the conspicuous absence of the gun he carries around almost constantly due to rampant transgenic-bashing mobs. 

It occurs to him, then, how there's a kind of resignation in the way they're all going about this, like an inevitability that's come to pass.

Like no one is even surprised Alec lost his mind. 

Alec is not surprised because he's not supposed to be—he was there for all the brain-scrambling Manticore was so fond of, he's the one with (mostly) full access to his own head and all its dangerous secrets—but everyone else? Scared, yes, and worried. But not surprised. It's like they saw cracks he didn't even know were showing, were just walking around behind him with their hands cupped and ready, waiting for his sanity to fall out. 

Max and Logan go on patching up any holes they can get at while Sketchy drives, uncharacteristically stoic as he checks his mirrors to make sure Cindy's still riding along behind them. Banding together to help Alec, and he wonders how they can, why they would. Even he, with the schizophrenic tendencies and swiss-cheese memory, knows they should've planted a bullet in his brain already. He's not just any random nutjob they can lock away in a padded cell; he's a government-trained walking catastrophe that no one with any professional psychiatric training will touch with a ten-foot pole. 

"Are they hunting me yet?" Alec asks. All these misfires in his head, a labyrinth of crooked nowhere roads and thousand-foot drop-offs, they make him want to run his mouth just make sure it still works. That anything does. 

"What?" Logan and Max say as one, looking up at him. 

"Are there headlines?" he asks, and coughs. "I bet there are headlines. **Monster among monsters** seems kinda catchy. **City organizes manhunt for mass-murdering freak**? Or maybe **Transgenics eat babies, news at eleven.** " 

"What the hell are you talking about?" Max demands, and _now_ she's pissed, red in the face and her glare like a storm. That's better, more fitting. "There's no manhunt."

Alec doesn't believe her. "I don't believe you," he says. 

"I don't give a damn what you believe. Your head's full of snot and this fever's melting your brain. Your opinion doesn't count, so just stop being—" Alec gives her points for trying so hard to avoid the use of any and all synonyms for 'crazy'. But then she jostles his hurt leg, making him hiss, and he is forced to take away some of those points. "Just shut up and take a fucking nap or something until we get to Logan's." 

They pull into Logan's driveway about ten seconds later, so Alec doesn't have to waste time arguing against the danger of naps. His temples are throbbing and his eyelids feel like they weigh a million-ton, but he smirks anyway. 

Max pins him with a look that says she's seriously regretting that he's too delicate for things like being smacked upside the head, but assures him she will conveniently forget that fact if he keeps it up. 

"Hey," Logan says softly, interrupting their stare-off. He drops a gloved hand on the shirt around their wrists, and it calls Alec's attention to the way Max is shaking. Makes him stop to really notice how furious she is, and it's not the kind of furious he needs her to be. "Alec, shut up. Max, head inside and calm down. We'll be right behind you."

And then he starts to untie them.

" _No._ " Alec clamps his fingers around Logan's wrist, can almost feel the bones grinding together under his grip, but he can't let up, can't let go. He cracks jokes when things get too serious, sure, but this is the _most_ serious thing. This is no joke. "Don't, you can't, don't you fucking dare," he rambles in a panic. "She has to stay. Max, you have to—"

"It's okay," Max says, prying Alec's fingers off Logan one by one. "I'm not going anywhere. Logan, I'm fine. We're both calm and we're fine."

"Shit, okay." Logan takes a second to appreciate that his hand is still attached, shaking it out. "I'm sorry. Didn't mean to upset you."

"I'm not fucking upset," Alec spits, hobbling his way out of the car. "I'm being cautious. I'm a superhuman fucking maniac and you should all act like you have some fucking sense left and approach me with some fucking caution."

Cindy and Sketchy join them in time to catch the tail-end of his outburst. They frown. Logan stares. Max looks away. 

Alec is upset. He's a fucking liar and he's upset, okay. But, fuck, Cindy and Sketchy being this close just confirms what he was afraid of. They're like cardboard cut-outs, background scenery, for all the messed-up part of his brain seems to care. Logan riles `it` up in the worst ways, and there's only so much blood his hands can take. 

"Stay away from me," Alec warns, shouldering Logan out of his way as he stomps up to the front porch, tugging Max along with him. 

Max tugs back, just to be contrary. "What the hell is your problem?" she hisses, and tugs sharply one more time to keep him from punting a lumpy jack-o-lantern off the porch and into the bushes. "Aside from the obvious."

_There's someone in my head but it's not me_ , Alec thinks, and then shakes himself before the rest of the song gets trapped in there. He knows it's a song but it's not a song he knows, and somehow that's too much. 

Alec freezes at the door, suddenly remembering where he is. He spins back around so fast Max smacks face-first into his chest. The impact makes his ribs ache, but it's distant. "We're not staying here," he decides. "We need a jail. Call Mole and tell him to make one."

"Right," Max drawls. "I'm sure he'll whip one right up for you. Alec—"

"Max." Alec steps back to look her in the eye. To make her look _him_ in the eye. "I can't. If you make me stay here, I'm going to hurt Logan. No offense," he offers to the man in question, who's thankfully taken Alec's advice and kept his distance, still standing in the driveway looking baffled and a little hurt. 

"What's wrong with Logan?"

"Nothing's wrong with Logan. Logan's perfect." Max screws her face up, like she can't decide if she should kick his ass or check his temperature again. "He fits the profile," Alec rephrases, "Perfectly."

Something must come through, the flicker of a thing desperate and long-starved, maybe, because Max goes pale almost instantly. "What are you—you can't be saying what I think you're saying," she says, and grabs onto both of his arms like they might need ripping off. 

And maybe that's not such a bad idea. Logan's got just enough fight, knows enough about what makes a supersoldier tick to present a challenge. And all that save-the-world righteousness, all that earnestness and unerring belief in something better, it doesn't help. Logan is `worthy`, and Alec's mouth waters at the mere idea of how satisfying the hunt could be. His chest spasms, there's a hole, Max is there and `she wouldn't like it` but oh god how he wants it. He's trembling with it. 

"Alec?" Max asks, and she is _asking_ , face pale and eyes wide as they can go, a vulnerability in them that Alec recognizes enough to hate, because she only looks at him like that when he's trying to kill her, stealing her virus-curing doctors to save his own life, or telling him about a certain serial-killing brother she sometimes sees when Alec's eyes catch the light just so. 

Alec knew, of course he did, he's not a total dumbass, but he was trying so hard not to say it out loud. "It's me," he assures, desperate for it to stay true. "I'm me, I'm Alec." 

Max looks relieved, looks disappointed, looks paranoid and breakable. 

It's out there now, and he's sorry, he is, but it's good that everyone knows what they're working with, and Max needs to know, needs to understand how far down and in and through him it goes. 

"I want to hunt him," Alec lays it out there in a rush, like jumping out of an airplane, drop, twist, freefall. "I wanna chase him all around the woods and up a tree and drag him back down kicking and screaming and break his leg. Then I wanna let him go just to see how far and fast he can run before I catch him again and break his other leg." 

He turns to Logan, and maybe he should reevaluate how much of a dumbass he is because that doesn't exactly help, seeing Logan all deer-caught-in-the-headlights and stubborn-as-a-mule at the same time. "Nothing personal, dude, you're just such a goodie-fucking-two-shoes." 

It would be awesome if Logan would go away right now, get back in the car and drive off into the sunset or just go hide in the fucking bushes so Alec can make it to the street without mauling anyone. Because it's not just the hunt. It's what the hunt will give him. He knows it's not true—despite whatever else may have been smashed to pieces up there, his logic still works—and yet...

There's still this sense that a proper hunt will fix him. Mind playing tricks, playing on his own desire to go back to the way he was only yesterday. Unconquerable odds, ritual sacrifice, problem solved.

He needs to stop thinking about this. 

He needs to. 

He can't. 

Alec closes his eyes and breathes. 

`Opens them.`


End file.
